Theologian criticises climate of fear in church

A LEADING Irish Catholic theologian has said that there is "a climate of fear" in the church today which is "totally out of keeping with the Good News that Jesus preached in a context of palpable freedom".

According to Father Gabriel Daly OP, people in the church are "afraid, for various reasons, to speak out and say what they really think".

In an article in the current issue of the Dominican publication, Religious Life Review, which is a printed version of a talk he gave at the annual general meeting of the Conference of Religious of Ireland and last month, he also says that "in many respects this fear is one of the greatest scandals in the Catholic Church today".

Concerning other recent scandals, he says church people had to learn in a very short time "how wrong it was to put the church before other more serious moral considerations".

Self-censorship was "virtually automatic in people whose status and livelihood are dependent on those who have power in the church", he says, and comments that a fear which prompts people "to place external conformity above truth and sincerity" is a counter-sign to the good news of salvation and "a contradiction" of the teaching of him who said that the truth would make us free.

Father Daly goes on to say that Catholics belong to a church which "as an institution" rarely if ever admits to having been wrong or to having inflicted harm on people.

"Reform in the Catholic Church is normally by amnesia," he continues, "which is a very unsatisfactory, and can be a dishonest kind of reform". He poses the question: "How can you reform an institution which, though it constantly speaks about personal sin, cannot bring itself to admit, and repent of, its own institutional sin?"

This was why, since news of scandals in the Irish church broke, church spokespeople often proved to be "inept and visibly uncomfortable" in handling the situation. Their training, he says, has conditioned them to defend the institutional church against even the most reasonable and justifiable criticism

The crisis brought about by the scandals "demanded an institutional response, and where necessary, institutional repentance, precisely because the good name of the institutional church had been put before just and effective pastoral action

Calling for reform or change in the Catholic Church today is not easy, he says. People feel they are "simply not being listened to by those who hold power".

He observes that during the 1980s and 1990s the feminist critique showed how "profoundly patriarchal" the Catholic Church was, but that by the time this critique had gained a strong foot-hold in the church a reactionary programme, sometimes referred to as 'restoration', had been mounted". This programme, he says, "promotes an authoritarian if not indeed sectarian, regime opposed to the vision of church which had emerged from Vatican II".

Looking at the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland Father Daly notes how, following the Penal Laws, it set out to create a counter-culture to parallel the institutions of society and state "which were British and Protestant". This had brought religion, politics and culture together in a way "which has left us with problems of Church and State, religious liberty, and inter-church relations today in the New Ireland".

With independence and the new state the Catholic Church achieved the sort of power in the State "which Roman canonists could only dream about". Its word was law and its authority was often exercised in a way which was "bigoted, puritanical and philistine". The list of books banned was "virtually an index to the world's great literature". There was an atmosphere of "anti-sex terrorism".

The process of disengagement between Church and State, however, had been long under way, but was telescoped and intensified by the scandals. "The scandals knocked us off a pedestal where most of us never wanted to be into the mud where none of us wants to be," says Father Daly.